The present invention relates to a system for producing installation instructions and more particularly to a system for producing installation instructions for installing a three dimensional cabling assembly in a larger assembly.
Design of network systems such as wire cables used for power or signals, plumbing fixtures and pipes, heating, ventilation and air conditioning duct work, aircraft mechanical cabling, pneumatic tubes and the like heretofore generally has been manual. For the purpose of brevity the word cable is used hereinbelow to represent all such elements appropriate to varied environments, such as, but not limited to, wire for electrical systems, pipes for plumbing systems and tubes for pneumatic systems. Wire, pipe or tube lengths, for example, are conventionally determined or estimated by various methods including measuring string on a mock-up scale or life-sized physical model of a product or of a building or by digitizing engineering drawings.
Resulting computer generated or manually generated drawings are symbolic, which is a disadvantage when designing a network. Such symbolic assembly drawings are usually not geometrically accurate nor are the dimensions accurate. The final engineering drawing used for installing the assembly is symbolic, so the drawing does not resemble a cable and thus has limited value to installers. Even when orthogonal drawings are geometrically accurate, one view is inadequate for installation purposes since only two of the three dimensions can be shown.
A distinction is made between cable assembly and cable installation. Assembly defines the process of building a cable itself. Installation occurs during the process of incorporating the cable assembly in a larger assembly.
Cable installation drawings suffer from other disadvantages: conventionally they are more descriptive than pictorial and when cables require sequential assembly, engineering drawings are so complex as to be almost invariably incomplete even after several revisions. Their level of complexity and degree of completeness are inversely related to the ease by which installers can decipher the drawings that describe the network. One of the few tasks not manually performed has been the process of drafting symbolic engineering drawings by a computer aided design system. Even here, data needed for drafting is usually accumulated ab initio for each drawing.
As a result of the aforementioned factors, engineering drawings for development projects that teach installation have usually been inadequate and frequently inaccurate.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,927,948 issued to Cox et al discloses a method and apparatus for aiding and designing structures, including constructing a working model roughly representative of the proposed structure. A working model is scanned to determine the geometric shapes and arrangements of various components. Such information is converted into electrical signals acceptable to a computer. The data is processed from the model scanning operation in accordance with preselected sets of programs to obtain a computer symbolic model of the proposed structure. The symbolic model is visually displayed and data defining the computer symbolic model is modified to obtain a computer facsimile model either by altering the working model, by altering the visually displayed computer symbolic model or by processing the data defining the computer symbolic model with data supplied from databases. The step in the aforementioned disclosure of constructing a working model is a limitation that can be very burdensome, costly and time consuming. Moreover, such physical models are relatively difficult to modify. The two dimensional drawings resulting from the aforementioned system are orthogonal views only.
It would be advantageous to provide a system to create installation instructions for a three dimensional cabling assembly.
It would also be advantageous for such a system to design a three dimensional digital computer model of a three dimensional cable assembly and of a larger assembly by using a three dimensional mechanical design system.
It would also be advantageous for such a system to select a three dimensional view of the model and transfer it to a two dimensional representation while retaining aspect ratios of the cable assembly and of the hardware of the product on which it is installed.
Moreover, it would be advantageous for such a system to provide the cable assembly geometry visually distinguished from the larger assembly so that the former assembly is clearly accentuated with respect to the latter.
It would also be advantageous for such a system to provide a mechanism whereby separate cable assemblies could be pictorially visually distinguished from one another.